This is a big problem for Mastodon.
Canadian journalist Erica Ifill just had her mastodon.online account suspended without explanation. She's been sharing stuff critical of Mastodon re: intersectional issues.
I get the decentralized structure and idea that each server has its own rules. But this Reddit-style moderation, where moderators with god-complexes make mysterious and arbitrary decisions, is going to cause people migrating to Mastodon to flee in droves.
I also don't think it is a serious solution to tell people, especially those from vulnerable communities, to just go find a server that respects them / allows them to criticize racism, etc.
People are joining Mastodon in good faith, but if they encounter these problems once, twice or more, it starts to send them the message they're not welcome here. It becomes a real brand problem and platform integrity issue.
There are a lot of people with good intentions putting work and time into building this platform who are probably frazzled and burnt out by how quickly its growing (first among them, Mastodon's founder @Gargron no doubt).
That said, I think it needs to continually ask itself if its structure and rules are advancing its mission and values or getting in the way of them? TBH, this kind of stuff seems at odds with what I like about Mastodon.
Update: Good to see @Mastodon being responsive and I'm sure it was an innocent mistake, but these mistakes keep happening and they point to deeper issues with the approach to moderation over here that really need to be worked out. A lot of responsibility is left on the shoulders of volunteer mods. Things could be more transparent and less arbitrary.
I hope people take some of these concerns that have been surfacing seriously rather than just tell people to go find a different server or whatever
And here is @Gargron addressing the moderation issue outlined above.
Some bigger questions about how these systems are set-up, but at least someone is stepping forward and showing accountability:
@llebrun @Gargron
1) the health and safety of the mods and admins. Are they aware, trained, compensated, and protected from harassment, doxxing, threats?
Are they prepared to handle what might be extremely traumatic images and content while sifting through content? Are there supports for their mental health doing this line of work?
Low-paid Facebook moderators have dealt with longterm health issues due to the trauma of seeing content as part of their work.
2/x
Mastodon looks *a lot* like email. Which is basically at this point a ubiquitous utility. It offers a range of options to users to pay for the service through ads, pay-for use, community run, etc.
Users then choose the course of action based on their values, without (for the most part), any loss of interoperability.
You OK with weird ad surveillance? Go gmail. Want to pay to ensure your privacy? Protonmail. Etc.
5/5
The *really* big instances are going to have major problems with this. No income stream and moderating 100,000s of users? no way in heck that's sustainable.
Switching to a smaller, better managed instance really is the reasonable solution. Reduces the problem chance of it happening to you while the systems scale and settle.
also happened here:
https://mastodon.online/@DevinCow/109385269930065020
Attached: 1 image I don’t know what I did @[email protected] I am sorry
@llebrun @Mastodon Obviously you have never experienced the complete arbitrariness of Twitter moderation. At least on that instance there is a human response and explanation instead of algorithmic suspensions (temporary and permanent) with no explanation or recourse. That's the gold standard for opaque and arbitrary, and Facebook is not much better (at least FB will offer a reason).
And that's before a discussion of Twitter burying posts based on content ("shadow banning").
#Mastodon is just a client interface for a federated messaging protocol.
If we start getting into ideologically-based "defederation wars", we'll end up balkanizing the network into clumps that don't talk to each other. In the end, more restrictive nodes will likely be outnumbered by the open ones.
We need to de-emphasize server admins and moderators and give users the tools they need to shape their own experiences, or to adopt experiences curated by trusted parties.
If we can fit about 10-100K people on a Mastodon server, and we've got 38M Canadians, then we're going to need 400 to 4000 Canadian servers. Let's start building them. #cosocialca http://cosocial.ca/
Not an ideal solution, but as Erica Ifill is a journalist, I wonder if she might consider migrating to newsie.social, which is smaller and I think less likely to make bad moderation mistakes. I think she will need access to her account back to migrate properly, though. @jeff
There are a number of well established smaller instances concerned about if mastodon.online and mastodon.social are growing too fast to moderate well, and mistakes like this are part of the problem.
@llebrun I think these are good, valid criticisms that #Mastodon will have to deal with in one way or another. I just urge everyone, reporters especially, to take into consideration the MASSIVE, MASSIVE workload these moderators are being put under with Twitter's collapse. Especially when you consider the immense resources deployed by established, corporate networks, like Facebook and (at one point) Twitter.
Some good perspective: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona
In a damning new report, Casey Newton gives an unprecedented look at the day-to-day lives of Facebook moderators in America. His interviews with twelve current and former employees of Cognizant in Arizona reveal a workplace perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos.
@goddessvault @llebrun Well, the main body of servers that federate to each other, the "non-nazi instances" if you like, have a _culture_. I wouldn't say rules – unless you can link to where they are written down?
Each instance has it's *own* rules, sure. But Mastodon as a whole? Not so much.
@caffeneko @llebrun *ahem* you mean like FB/Twitter/…
These instances are still private servers that you are using.
In some jurisdictions (e.g. EU) you still might have privacy expectations, but you do not have an expectation of service.
@caffeneko @yacc143 @llebrun Yes – but if a mod misses banning someone problematic then it's likely their whole instance will be defederated by other servers. Boom, whole server. So *of course* they tend to be trigger happy.
There are reasons for this – blocking the entire instance is the only way you can really make your users safe from malicious users on the other instance. But. But!
@caffeneko @llebrun
@TheKinrar
What about incorporating some kind of review/rating system with instances.social?
@llebrun Yes, I heard the same thing from someone posting about racialized issues on .social who got their post moderated for no reason.
I think it's really important to find a good instance (but then, you never know who will change their views).
if Eugene Rochko (@Gargron) does not make Mastodon an affirmatively anti-racist space, he makes it a de-facto
white supremacist space.
Eugene Rochko oversees the day-to-day operations of Mastodon.Social and Mastodon.Online, the flagship instances of the Mastodon project, which he heads.
Positive justice is preferable to "peaceful" injustice.
This is a lesson I had to teach Jeff of Discourse forum project fame the hard way.
@dudleysaunders @llebrun @Gargron
Eugen's explanation and apology lays out what happened and what steps are being taken to address this going forward. These incidents were upsetting, but I am glad that Eugen has taken accountability and action.
https://mastodon.lol/@Gargron@mastodon.social/109383948564712812
There were two notable moderation incidents on mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the past 24 hours that I would like to address. In the first, a post was wrongfully removed due to a report claiming it contained a dogwhistle, and in the second, a person was wrongfully suspended due to a report claiming it's an impersonator. Both were undone and apologies issued.
@mvlasic @llebrun
Obviously not, that's not what the Fediverse tries to be.
GMail, Hotmail and my private email server have one central set of rules what kind of emails are okay, right?
Reality is, if you don't like your instance and its administration, choose another, or run your own instance. It's basically the same choice you have for getting email service.
Mastodon is just a service running over ActivityPub in the Fediverse.
Just like Email runs over ESMTP.
@llebrun Isn't that mostly a big problem for that particular instance?
Good instances, especially the big ones, should have strict and transparent moderation scheme. We should learn from such cases and improve common practices in the fediverse.
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